Short recap: Rebecca Watson was asked to give a speech about feminism and atheism. She mentioned a personal example of an unnamed man propositioning her in an elevator at 4 AM and said something to the effect of, “Guys, don’t do this. It’s creepy and it makes women uncomfortable at atheist conferences.” The atheist blogosphere was then swarmed by MRA trolls claiming the proposition wasn’t sexist and women should feel flattered when they find themselves trapped and alone with a stranger who wants sex. Including Richard Dawkins, an atheist heavyweight, who claimed that the proposition was as offensive as chewing gum. Anyway, I really liked PZ Myers’ response: “If you’re a decent human being, here’s how to flirt without looking skeevy. If you can’t handle this, please don’t even come.

For those who can’t see it, it’s a pseudo-anime style picture of three protesters at what appears to be a gay pride rally. A white
woman holds a sign saying “FOR” whilst holding her fist in the air, next to her is a brown man gritting his teeth and holding a sign that
says “AGAINST”, the third person is a white man with an excited look on his face holding a sign saying “I JUST WANTED TO HOLD A SIGN AND MAKE NOISES TOO”.

The author says this: “Good ol’ politics! No matter how passionate and active you are toward your cause, you’ll
always be just a sign-waving, noise-making collection of cells taking up space on sidewalk intersection corners. I understand why though. It’s fun to have a supposedly legitimate excuse to run around yelling at the poor public about beliefs that no one wants to hear
I can’t wait for election times coming up. Sign waving people gathering pointless screaming car honking season!”

This really irritated me.

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Comments

I’m pretty sure it was in one of the LOGI, I’m just not sure which, or of any way to search them.

Sylvia Sybil: claiming that if women didn’t engage in “risky” behavior like drinking then the rate of rape would drop.

It would drop, but does that alone mean it’s a good solution? Because it would drop much further if we:

–Put all men in jail.
–Killed all men and stored some sperm for propagation.

Therefore those are automatically better ideas which we should implement immediately, right? Yeah, I don’t think so either. But it’s true that both these options would work much better than the “restrict women’s lives” plan we’ve been following for hundreds of years with no drop in rape rates. Because prisoners can always be preyed on – vulnerable to their guards and anyone their guards let in. Prisoners, like women, are seen as property, and guards identify with other people outside of prison. Guards are more likely to smuggle people in to hurt prisoners than to smuggle prisoners out to hurt others. That psychology is what’s at work behind the truism that a woman is most likely to be raped by someone at home or known to her.

As long as we keep treating women like prisoners, we actually encourage the view that they’re fair game for rapists.

An even better solution than any of the draconian measures mentioned by rape apologists or by me (facetiously) is for everyone to be taught that rape is not okay, and your desire to “get laid” has nothing to do with it. Maybe in a world where rape was truly rare, getting propositioned by a stranger in an elevator in the wee hours would be no more obnoxious than listening to someone pop bubblegum. And – oh, look! That is the world in which Dawkins lives. A world where the chances of HIS getting raped in that situation are pretty remote.

I think that many people who don’t believe in rape culture haven’t noticed that women are expected, all day every day, to put up with things that men consider an assault on their dignity. Smile, baby. Why won’t you smile for me? You look sexually attractive to me but you won’t have sex with me–there must be something wrong with you and I’m going to tell you so. Ima just let my eyes take a walk all over you here; why else did you leave the house this morning? Now I’ll tell a joke that is only funny if you consider your own gender to be subhuman, just to watch how you react. I’m aroused and I know you know it and the fact that you are reacting at all, even with disgust, must mean that you’re interested, and if you don’t do what I want you are depriving me of something that is rightfully mine. And running through all of this is the fact that I can loom over you and overpower you physically and we both know it.

Do you happen to have support for that handy? Because as I recall, the riskiest behaviors women can engage in are going to college, joining the military, earning less than $15k annually, being under age 18, etc. Maybe the rates would drop by a miniscule amount, to account for those cases when a rapist wasn’t planning to rape but stumbled across a pre-made opportunity, but I think in most cases rapists will manufacture a victim when they can’t find one. Anecdata alert, but all of the women I know who were raped when drunk were also raped by that same person in other circumstances.

Um, did you take in anything I said past “it would”? I’ll get back to this in the 2nd paragraph.

My logic was simply: rape rates often rise proportionately in contexts where women and girls are drinking more than they would be in other contexts. I wasn’t arguing that if all female drinking stopped, it would drop the rate a lot, or even enough to be worth talking about from an effectiveness standpoint – it might well be miniscule, as you said. But politicians often espouse solutions that are marginally effective, at best, and use that “effectiveness” as justification.

I may have been unclear, but I think you kind of really missed my point, which was that effectiveness is NOT proof of a proposed solution’s merit. I mean, you can resolve a hostage situation by shooting the hostage, but most people would object to that as a “solution”, I hope. And you could lower the rape rate hugely by putting all men in jail, but again, most people would reject it. If we’re supposed to lower rape stats by asking half the species to curtailing their rights significantly compared to those of the rest of the species, then even if that solution is effective, it would still be wrong. Solutions must be examined holistically and not just for effectiveness.

And the reason that point is so important is that, to some twisted minds, you just argued that if women were banned from going to college or joining the military, the rape rates would lower. Some people have offered me that solution in all seriousness. And given how much they’ve risen since women started engaging in those activities, there’s almost no question there’d be a noticeable statistical drop if we, say, banned women from college and the military. And a lot of people see no reason why that’s an unreasonable concession to ask of women.

I NEVER get into effectiveness arguments with rape apologists, because the fact is they DO have some gobsmacking ideas that would admittedly lower rape rates. Instead, I argue that “solutions” which curtail people’s rights to live and move about and do stuff, however effective, are by their nature not real solutions – anymore than “shoot the hostage” is a viable solution to a hostage situation.

I see your point now. Possibly I’ve been arguing with rape apologists too long, because when I saw you ignoring that point (“it would drop”) and focusing on another (“so should we do it?”), I assumed you were conceding the point, which would be victim blaming. Probably a sign I should get off the internet and enjoy some fresh, non-MRAsshole contaminated air. 🙂

Jenny Islander,
I actually had a very depressing moment while visiting family. A couple of months ago, my mom said something very astute and aware about rape culture … which was pretty much negated to me during this visit, when she engaged in a very long, horrendous conversation with one of my sisters about how girls shouldn’t wear bikinis because that’s sleazy and is basically asking for bad things to happen; it was their job to control their environment and body so as not to borrow trouble, etc., etc.

I attempted to clue them in to their woefully misinformed opinions, failed and started downing vodka lemonades like they were Kool-Aid instead.

Hmm, what was my point? Oh, that somehow there are people who get that rape culture is real on one hand, yet also perpetuate it themselves with their other hand and we never. get. anywhere.

You know… I don’t even know how to respond to the fact I was thinking about a specific case, and then I get several links to and find via google COMPLETELY different cases which are similar enough to prove the point.

Jennifer, I love your extremely logical argument there. Sadly I don’t think this is going to go anywhere since dude is rape apologizing all over the thread (I just pulled out Derailing for Dummies and listed all the techniques he learned) but it might be useful for other people reading.

Also I’m apparently JUST LIKE a fundamentalist Christian. I don’t even know what kind of derail that is, I’m still kind of amazed at the comparison.

Shaun: Jennifer, I love your extremely logical argument there. Sadly I don’t think this is going to go anywhere since dude is rape apologizing all over the thread (I just pulled out Derailing for Dummies and listed all the techniques he learned) but it might be useful for other people reading.

Yeah sorry. The creepy rape apologist was on a friend’s facebook. He’s since been defriended after stating that rape was a “natural consequence” of how women dress and implying that this is also the case for 11-year-old girls, SO, I don’t think your brilliant logic would have made a difference.

Pumpkin, I hear you. I’ve been an atheist for as long as I can remember — except for an ugly period of being guilt-tripped and fear-mongered into religion when I was first manifesting my mental problems at full tilt as a young teen. Later, around twenty, I had long left that behind and got into some “loud-mouthed atheist” circles (who, thankfully, really WERE forward about the whole gender/sexuality/race issues) as a kind of backlash to that experience and in delight that I wasn’t alone. It felt bloody GOOD to let all the rage out and really speak my mind. I drifted away later because flaming proselytizing trolls is only novel for so long and doesn’t really solve anything, and I discovered more constructive/interesting things on the ‘net.

Color me sickened and furious when I later found out that some “famous”, “big-name” atheists are just as full of misogynist, homophobic etc. hate and contempt as the most backwards theists. If they really were skeptics and critical thinkers and good scientists, then why don’t they bloody USE the tools that this gives them to examine and deconstruct their sky-high shitpile of privilege? But no, instead they make up some awful pseudo-scientific excuses and enshrine them like a “holy book”. Way to go, guys. I still can’t stand most religions I know of, but if anyone needed proof that religion ISN’T the root of all problems, Dawkins and his wankbuddies provide plenty of it.